Android PlayStation emulator PSX4Droid pulled from Market

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Of course there will be much speculation as to why Google would pull the Android Market App known as PSX4Droid. According to the applications creator ZodTTD, Google informed him that the reason the app was being pulled was because of “Content Policy violation.” More intriguing is the general statement Google sent out regarding the entire debacle: “We remove apps from Android Market that violate our policies.” What we would like to know is how come it took the company over eight months for them to take action about such a popular emulator. We’re pretty sure that they have gotten one too many requests from content providers to pull the offending emulator. Could the removal of the app coincide with the recent launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play and its PlayStation network which is promising to bring many new applications and games to the Android Marketplace?

It’s easy to point fingers at Sony or Google getting cozy in bed and while many would like to speculate that Sony did have something to do with the removal of the app, others have pointed out that FPSe is still available in the Marketplace (at least at the time of this writing). So why no love for one and plenty of love for the other? It could be for a multitude of reasons including the fact that PSX4Droid is based off source from another emulator called PCSX which is released under the GPL license. PSX4Droid is not and it could be that this is a similar situation like the VLC media player app being pulled from the Apple App Store thanks to conflict of open source licensing.

In either case, courts have ruled that emulators do not actually break laws because they only provide a service even though they are mainly used to break copyright laws, much the same thing with P2P networks such as BitTorrent, LimeWire and others.